Rating: 3.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2016 | 28/52 | Mondo Macabro
CW // Death, Sexual Violence, Assault, Abuse, Torture, Animal Death, Blood
When the war ended, Tokyo became a city of savages. It was kill or be killed in the battle for survival, and the weak lost out.
Komasa Sen is a sex worker. She leads a band of fellow sex workers — Roku, Mino, Ofuku, and Machiko — who stick together and protect one another from the American GIs and the Yakuza. They are squatters in a bombed-out building that secures them from the outside world.
Maya walks the streets, shell-shocked and desperate. She begs Sen, who offers Maya a job. Sen gives Maya the rundown on sex work and lays out the one cardinal rule: never give it to a guy for free.
Ofuku breaks the rule. The women strip her, tie her up, flog her, and leave her bound to a boat in the barge. If she lives, she can’t come back to them.
Ibuki is a former soldier wounded in a fight with an American GI. He knifed the GI, sending the military police after him. On the run, he finds refuge in the women’s den. They reluctantly let him stay until he heals up.
Ibuki charms the women, but Maya sees more than a sexual partner. She sees a way out.
Hit bottom, suffer the hard times, and rebuild from scratch. That's the only route to a new life.
The backstreets in this movie are sometimes convincing. Other times, the world is just a stage play. Flat buildings cut into three walls, with the fourth wall open to the camera. Painted skies and studio lighting pull you out of the desolation and into the subjective.
In one scene, a spotlight shines on Sen as she entertains a john.
Each woman wears a color — Sen in red, Roku in yellow, Mino in purple, and Maya in green. Machiko wears a black traditional kimono — a symbol of the lost geisha culture.
In scenes that enter the women’s internal dialogue, the world will glow their respective colors, further highlighting the subjectivity of the moment.
Precise lighting keeps the movie from being more exploitative than it is. And it is exploitative. Everyone shows some amount of skin throughout the film, including the fit Ibuki, who gets a shower butt scene.
The movie has an almost humorous tone. It’s never laugh-out-loud funny, but the peculiarities and character behaviors stand out against the bleak world they inhabit.
Elegantly blocked and composed, this movie is a visually striking potboiler with more on its mind than titillation.